A Welsh Hundred: Glimpses of Life in Wales Drawn from a Pair of Family Diaries for 1841 and 1940

By W. Ambrose Bebb

By combining a pair of diaries written a century apart, A Welsh Hundred reveals for the first time in English the genuine character of daily life in the Welsh-speaking heartlands of Middle and North Wales. In the hands of W. Ambrose Bebb, the published diary opened up a new avenue for Welsh-language literature; and Bebb's work was hailed at its debut as "the tour de force of a true artist.... There is nothing exactly like it to be found written in Welsh, French or English." This contemporary translation gives English readers their first glimpse into the joys and disappointments, struggles and achievements of "real life" in Wales as lovingly portrayed by one of her favorite sons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467861281

W. Ambrose Bebb

W. Ambrose Bebb (1894-1955) was revered in Wales as a writer, historian, teacher and statesman. A native of rural West Wales, he graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1918 with honors in Welsh and History, whereupon he earned his M.A. degree in 1920. He subsequently lectured at the Sorbonne in Paris and traveled widely in France, Brittany and the Continent before returning permanently to North Wales where he lectured in History and Welsh at Normal College, Bangor. Bebb was also a co-founder of the Welsh Nationalist Party whose Plaid Cymru members today constitute an increasingly visible presence in the U.K. Parliament at Westminster and in the National Assembly for Wales at Cardiff. Marc K. Stengel, a dual-citizen of the U.S.A. and Canada, is a writer and translator living in Nashville, Tennessee.

Book preview

A Welsh Hundred:

Glimpses of Life in Wales

drawn from a pair of family diaries for 1841 and 1940

1.

The Faraway Paradise

by William Bebb

compiled & edited by W. Ambrose Bebb

m.a. Lecturer/Reader in the Normal College, Bangor, Wales

originally published October 1941

2.

1940:

Gleanings from a Diary

by W. Ambrose Bebb

originally published February 1941

translated by

Marc K. Stengel

2008

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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These works were originally published in Welsh in 1941 by Llyfrau’r Dryw [Wren Books], later part of Christopher Davies Publishers, Ltd.

All Rights Reserved

Original works:  1955 Estate of W. Ambrose Bebb

English translation:  2009 Marc K. Stengel

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the copyright holders.

This edition first published by AuthorHouse 7/3/09

ISBN: 978-1-4343-5991-9 (sc)

ISBN: 9781467861281 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008906877

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Dedication

I fy ngwraig i,

Terry

Contents

Translator’s Foreword

Notes to Translator’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Regarding endnotes

About the Book

Author’s Dedication

Map for The Faraway Paradise

Preface

The Faraway Paradise

Notes to The Faraway Paradise

About the Book

Author’s Dedication

Map for 1940: Gleanings from a Diary

Preface

1940: Gleanings from a Diary

Notes to 1940: Gleanings from a Diary

Translator’s Foreword

In more than one sense, the two diaries that have been combined into this compact single volume are like ghosts. As revenants, they are re-appearing in 2009 from beyond the grave for out-of-print books, to which they were consigned almost 70 years ago after their well received initial publications in 1941. As poltergeists, they are barging into the English-language world for the first time – brash upstarts and the presumptuous brain-children of a translator who has literally willed them into being in defiance of apathy towards the unfamiliar on the one hand, the logic of the marketplace on the other. But illogicality is the poltergeist’s favorite mischief in any event.

Most ghostly of all, perhaps, is the relationship that has arisen between the deceased author of these diaries-made-public and his very much alive translator, who has intruded himself into them uninvited. Although separated by time, distance and language, both men have established an intimate bond that the two of them – bold as it is to assert – have shared equally in forging.

William Ambrose Bebb, born in 1894, was roughly of the same generation as my grandparents. When he died in 1955, I was still a year from being born; and we would still not meet – in the figurative sense, of course – until I determined in 2005 to translate into English a selection of his entertaining and unconventional works concerning the history of Wales. As it happened, I had only recently been alerted to their existence by the merest passing reference to one of them in a footnote by the late historian Sir Rees R. Davies. In a general acknowledgment of sources consulted during his writing of The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, Davies wrote, A charming and undervalued portrait of Welsh society based on the evidence of the poetry is W. Ambrose Bebb, Machlud yr Oesoedd Canol [Twilight of the Middle Ages] (Swansea, 1951).¹

A juxtaposition of the words charming and undervalued has an electrifying effect upon some people. In my own case, the charge was sufficient to goad me into finding, then translating this book for the first time into English (publication forthcoming). It was clear to me then, is even clearer now, that here was a unique, idiosyncratic, uncompromising voice which was, on account of the author’s deliberate intent, entirely mute within the English-language world. (Bebb could be emphatic on this score: My dear friend! he once fretted to a Breton-speaking acquaintance who lapsed too frequently into French; Neither my wife nor I speak a word of English – ever – to our children. And still, their English is none the worse for it. ² The Breton language is remarkably similar, and is of course related, to Welsh.)

And yet after translating seven of Bebb’s histories, all of which will be published in due course, I concluded that his strictly academic histories concerning various periods and aspects of life in Wales were too specialized and narrowly focused to serve as compelling introductions – in English – to the wit, vivacity and piquancy of Bebb’s prose and personality. But among his standard histories there also exist several diaries in the writer’s hand; and two of these in particular seemed ideal for putting Bebb’s best foot forward in an English-language debut.

The first diary selected, The Faraway Paradise, is Bebb’s historical-fictional reconstruction of a year, 1841, in the life of his great-great- uncle William Bebb, who lived in rural Montgomeryshire in the middle of Wales near Llanbrynmair, east of Machynlleth. The second book, 1940: Gleanings from a Diary, is Bebb’s eye-witness account of the first full year of the Second World War, with its dreadful losses in Continental Europe and terrifying consequences for Great Britain. By choosing to compile these two diaries under the title A Welsh Hundred I am, of course, evoking Wales’ ancient territorial division known as y cantref – the hundred (literally, one hundred farmsteads), a subdivision of county or shire lands. More significantly, however, as bookends for a century that witnessed profound transformations in the only Principality of a far-flung British Empire, Bebb’s pair of diaries serve as an enchanting, provocative introduction to the life and spirit of a Wales that most English speakers outside of that small country simply know nothing about.

Part of the immense pleasure in composing these translations was coming to terms – literally – with a gorgeous language that nevertheless can baffle an inelastic, English-comprehending mind. Then too there was the delight in coming to more figurative terms with a man praised by his peers as the writer of the most beautiful and most vivacious Welsh of our century³ and as a literary man [who] was a splendid artist. He had the rich vocabulary of Cardiganshire,…of dialect witticism, moral idioms, proverbs and rhymes, a cascade of language.⁴ Bebb’s personality – and by extension, his genuinely Welsh perspective upon life in this world – is on fascinating display in expressions like without hairs on his tongue (i.e., without mincing words); day draws its head in (the days are shortening); might as well put the fiddle on the roof (throw in the towel); and what’s wrong with the cheese? (what gives?).

In both diaries, Bebb manages to convey vividly the rounded wholeness of life in a Wales that manages to participate fully in a global community of nations while yet persevering as a comprehensive culture that is traditional, somewhat exotic, unmistakably sui generis. As his colleague and friend Saunders Lewis observed on the occasion of Bebb’s untimely death at age 61, he could describe men better than cities; villages better than mighty towns; fields and tillage and the color and scent of the earth better than architecture…. The description of the farmstead of his childhood at the beginning of Crwydro’r Cyfandir [Roaming the Continent]…is a key to his entire body of work.⁵

Lewis’ perception is apt. In the chapter of the travel book that Lewis cites, Bebb has just returned home after several years of studying and teaching at Rennes in Brittany and at the Sorbonne in Paris. While climbing up to the Banc, as the high pasture of his parents’ farm was known, he exults with a tinge of irony, Let the reader bear in mind that there isn’t the slightest connection between this place-name and that institution where cautious folk of this day and age keep all their silver and gold. Wealth is where you find – and enjoy – it after all. Upon reaching his high, familiar perch Bebb points out the three glories of the Banc: The first is its commanding vistas over the surrounding countryside, from the peak of Pumlumon to the town of Lampeter to the shores of Lake Eiddwen. The second delight is a little stream that flows through the middle of the Banc. It issues from an ever-dependable mountain tarn above; and its clear, cool waters have been known to soothe many a sore limb fatigued by hiking and climbing.

And the third glory is the teeming acres of ferns that grow to remarkable heights upon the Banc, a sort of forest of fronds. If you ever want to get completely lost, here’s the place to do so. I’ve been known to walk through them for long stretches, forging my way with ample difficulty, all the while pondering the branches that reach so high above my head and fill my nostrils with their perfume. After a while in their midst, you feel as if your very heart and soul have been christened by them. And it’s not until you experience this sensation during each and every visit that you will finally possess the keys to the virtue and genius of this place. Then, when that happens, you and the thicket of bracken become one – laughing together, soaking up the same delight of a sunny day, drenching in the same downpour of a storm sweeping up from the fens of Cors Caron.⁶

In both diaries as well, Bebb uses glittering set-pieces like this one to punctuate a year of travails and frustrations. Against its 19th-century backdrop of political unrest, Chartism,⁷ religious debate, financial insecurity and the emigration of friends and neighbors to America, The Faraway Paradise also crackles with William Bebb’s evocative descriptions of, for example, a mighty mountain tempest in early spring or of harvest-time and market days in autumn. A century later, in 1940, W. Ambrose Bebb’s Easter hike in Snowdonia; July visit to Ysbyty Ifan; and September labors at the grain harvest all serve as potent analgesics against the news and experience of war.

In concluding his elegy upon the death of his friend Ambrose Bebb, Saunders Lewis wrote, One can hear his voice in the page-leaves of his books. Alas, one will not hear it otherwise from now on.⁸ If Lewis intended by this to put Bebb’s memory elegantly to rest, he would perhaps have been surprised at how far his friend’s voice has carried in both time and distance. For there is an element in my own deepening collaboration with Bebb that neither the late writer himself nor Lewis – nor I – could possibly have foreseen. Among the Welsh-speaking Welsh – Y Cymry Cymraeg – Bebb was known during his lifetime as a great teacher, writer, speaker: He was grand without being grandiose, one of his former students is reported to have said in Robin Chapman’s biography.⁹ But above all, Bebb is still remembered in Welsh Wales today as one of a trio of founders, with Saunders Lewis and G.J. Williams, of Y Mudiad Cymreig [The Welsh Movement] which eventually became the Plaid Cymru [Party of Wales] of contemporary politics in both the United Kingdom Parliament and in the much newer Welsh Assembly. The English-speaking world is, by and large, unaware of this; and a native Englishman in particular would be hard-pressed to find any significance in this circumstance anyway. The same could be said about Bebb’s voluminous literary production – indeed, about Welsh prose and poetry in general. Wales has a major literature, one contemporary commentator has observed, that has tragically no voice in twentieth-century Britain as a whole¹⁰ – or, it might be said, in twenty-first-century Britain either.

But here is where Lewis may have been a bit too hasty to close the covers on the page-leaves of his friend. For me, a native of the American South, whose hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, witnessed the founding of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and ’30s, it is not only Bebb’s books that have provoked a fascination with this curious Welshman but also the striking harmony of his politics with that of the Tennessee Agrarians. The similarities between a Welsh nationalist movement and a Southern U.S. regionalist movement are all the more striking and unanticipated because, despite their patent sympathies in points of view, despite their corresponding vulnerabilities at the hands of political rivals, these two influential groups would surely have been mutually unaware of one another. Certainly, the Southerners would have despaired of comprehending Welsh; whereas the Welshmen, who generally knew but pointedly abjured English, would have little countenanced Tennessee. To co-opt the wonderment that Salman Rushdie recently expressed about Mughal India and Renaissance Italy in his most recent novel The Enchantress of Florence: How interesting it is that two apparently separate cultures should, within half a century of each other, have been coming up with the same notions without conferring.¹¹

A detailed examination of the convergence of Welsh Nationalist and Southern Agrarian philosophies is beyond the scope or purpose of this Foreword; but perhaps some examples of their affinities will whet an appetite that can be sated in future: In Wales during the ’20s and ’30s of the last century, Bebb and his fellow partisans championed gwlad, gwerin and iaith [countryside, common folk and language]. During those decades, in fact, there was something pan-Celtic in the air that gravitated naturally towards rural and agrarian preoccupations – and away from the urban, industrial and imperial ones associated with the horrors and aftermath of The Great War of 1914-18. In Ireland, George William Russell (known as Æ to his friends James Joyce and W.B. Yeats) wrote frequently in defense of rural sensibilities for the journal he edited, The Irish Homestead. I would regret with a personal passion, he wrote in an open letter To Irish Farmers in 1915, "that your class should cease to be predominant in our national life. I believe that country is happiest and has the most moral and stable life where agriculture predominates among the industries. A fine life is possible for humanity working on the land, bronzed by the sun and wind, living close to nature, affected by its arcane influences, which bring about essential depth and a noble simplicity of character. To create a rural civilization is a great ideal.

There is another life, fine in its way, where humanity, collected in the cities, has exalted urban civilization by the arts and sciences until the cities are beautiful and healthy and the life is quickened by intellect. The first civilization it is in our power to create in a generation at its best. The second for us would indeed be a long labor,…but we will move a hundred times more rapidly to national prosperity and happiness if we try to make our civilization predominantly rural.¹²

Sentiments like these, it should be noted, made a profound impression upon one of Bebb’s close associates, D.J. Williams, whose 1929 chapbook A.E. a Chymru [A.E. and Wales] meant to adapt Russell’s brand of Irish agrarianism to a Welsh intellectual climate. Agriculture is the foundation of man’s stewardship of the world, Williams wrote. Life has no future in the great cities, according to A.E…. In them, one finds only dust and ashes. For life at its fullest – in all its fecundity, its flowering, its maturing and ripening – only the countryside will do. And this must be preserved.¹³ Williams proceeded to quote A.E. directly: ‘As Walt Whitman has said, wherever men and women live life at its best, there you will find a great metropolis – even if it is nothing more than a humble hamlet. One of the mistakes of thinking only in material terms is to suppose that one cannot enjoy the same high standards of living in a village that one finds in a proper town.’¹⁴ Williams seemed to be echoing Bebb’s own sentiments when he declared, I do indeed believe that A.E.’s spiritual philosophy as well as his practical recommendations for transforming that philosophy into social reality constitute invaluable advice that we cannot afford to ignore at this point in history.¹⁵ And in fact, in the following diary entry for 1 June 1841, Bebb’s alter ego William says as much for himself: If agriculture dies, …it will be the death of talent, the death of excellence, the death of every rural art. The sweet sounds that fill even the smallest villages with harmony will fade away. Those noises and activities interwoven into the pattern of a Welshman’s life – that actually collude in supporting and maintaining Welsh Society – all of them will be dead and gone.¹⁶

Apart from his concerted efforts spent in championing the virtues of village and small-farm life – even from his perch as lecturer in Welsh and History at Normal College in Bangor, Wales – our diarist also witnessed and sympathized with like-minded gestures in Brittany devoted to similar ideals. In his 1939 account of a political meeting in the northern Breton town of Tréguier on the eve of yet another world war, Bebb noted that a Mme Drouart "discussed ways of keeping the Bretons on the land, of enticing them to forego the cities and re-emphasize their Breton origins. She suggested ways for giving them their dignity back; for making them conscious of their forefathers’ inheritance; for binding them to their homesteads with invisible bonds of tradition, custom, ritual. She encouraged them to build their own homes in the native